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Panda 3.8 and Google query report

Today I was plugging the SEOMoz Google change log into my analytics and noticed that our site took an impression jump (30%) on the day Panda 3.8 was released but also, if I'm reading the chart right, a drop in keyword avg. ranking. Does this make any sense or am I misunderstanding the chart?

Yeah, that is weird. I'm honestly not sure if average position is by unique keyword or keyword volume. In other words, maybe you gained position on a couple of head terms that produce a ton of impressions, but lost position on a bunch of long-tail terms. So, average position across unique keywords would fall, but you'd still gain traffic, because the loss was mostly on low-traffic keywords.

You'd have to dive into the keywords and/or segment them (head, long-tail, etc.) to see for sure.

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